Why are we still playing by 1968 rules?

Sometimes you have to wonder just how naïve or at least amnesiac the American people and their elected officials have become.

Apparently pretty darn naïve, or they would recognize the well-worn battle plan used by the left for decades.

Once the left decided to loosen the leash on their dogs, it becomes somewhat more than merely interesting to examine the careful preparation necessary to combat the other side in the streets.

Despite the popular narrative that Donald Trump and his supporters are solely responsible for the protests, not a single Trump supporter had created a violent exchange at any of his rallies or those of the opposition until the left-wing paid agitators and organizers showed up.

Their appearance isn’t the beginning of the problem.

History is repeating itself

This organized chaos is the result of careful advance planning and masterful manipulation of events.

In some respects, the 2016 election protests are starting to feel a lot like the contentious and ultimately violent DNC convention atmosphere of 1968, right down to the global components.

We should never want to go that place again, but somehow we are dealing with the same Pavlovian responses to the same stimuli.

Lacking the assassinations and civil rights tinder of that era, the protestors on the left are working with what they have in advance of the Cleveland and Philadelphia conventions.

For the past eighteen months or so, what should have been incidents of purely local interest have been catapulted onto the national stage and a carefully manipulated media strategy designed and implemented.

That’s not an accident. This instructional handbook was written in the 1960’s and has been updated as necessary ever since then. Let us not forget, many of the foot soldiers of that time are the mentors to the command-and-control structure of today.

In fact, four of the five current candidates are old enough to have watched or even participated in the political struggles of that time.

One of the basic rules of war is to render your enemy ineffective. There is no need to kill your enemies. All you have to do is render them incapable of fighting back.

For more than a year now, the objective has been to portray all law enforcement as corrupt and racist. This narrative, upheld and even encouraged by the White House, is meant to portray all cops as mad-dog killers, and all people of color as blameless victims of racism and bigotry.

Fast forward to the present, and watch the interaction between law enforcement and the so-called protesters.

It is not legal to block a public highway. Period. It’s not legal to stop people from attending public events through the use of force and/or intimidation. Period. It’s not legal to threaten a candidate’s life or those of his family. Period.

What part of illegal is that we don’t want to recognize?

Pretty much all of it.

It’s no accident that the Saturday protest against Trump was staged in the backyard of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The controversial and often sued sheriff was faced with upholding both the rights of the protestors to assemble and the rights of their opponents to speak and attend events.

The hard part is to do it without inviting claims of racism and bigotry for defending Trump supporter’s right to hear him speak.

These protests not only affect the immediate area, but can create chaos far outside the impact zone. In Arizona’s Maricopa County, cars were backed up for miles. Luckily for those caught in the traffic jam, no one had a medical emergency or got into an auto accident as a result.

In this climate any action law enforcement takes to break up an unlawful assembly is going to be spun to show that it is the cops against the good guys.

Once it became apparent that professional agitators were organizing these protests, you would think that law enforcement would be on scene to keep the two sides apart before things got out of and.

Yet time after time, you don’t see local LEO’s enter the picture until everything is almost completely out of control.

Unlike for instance New York City, many smaller law enforcement agencies have no experience with handling these incidents proactively. They are conditioned to wait until somebody shoots first before intervening.

Others may simply have been given orders not to do anything that might reflect on the city or county or result in a DOJ investigation.

Sooner or later that’s going to have bad consequences. Some dumb-a** will decide it’s tit-for-tat and bring a group to a Sanders or Clinton rally. Then we can all sit back in front of the TV tsk-tsking and denouncing the violence.

Typically, very few people from outside the area are needed to organize folks who already feel that they have a legitimate beef with something. Once they get the fuel burning, they can step aside and let the ordinary folks that just want to be heard carry the weight.

Human nature being what it is, somebody’s going to throw a punch and then it’s on.

All of that is carefully planned months if not years in advance. ” If that-then this” scenarios are role-played until people can fulfill their duties without conscious thought.

More noticeably than usual, the right to free speech and freedom of assembly has been the exclusive domain of the left for several years now. We have been conditioned to expect and even condone the practice of upholding the rights of only one side of an argument as “tolerance.”

New tactics for an old problem.

These incidents can be handled peacefully and still respect everyone’s right to dissent or oppose a candidate.

For instance, why not keep the two sides separated? It seems almost too easy, but for some reason, local governments allow the two sides to co-mingle without restraint. That’s just plain asking for trouble.

People have a right to disagree, but that doesn’t mean they have to disagree with their noses six inches apart.

The opposition should be given an adequate area a safe distance from the main venue to assemble, and law enforcement’s job should be to make sure they stay separated.

Another way to stop the intimidation would be for a member or members of the public to press charges at the Federal level on the constitutional grounds that these protestors are denying the complainant’s rights to freely assemble or to exercise the right of free speech.

Do that whenever someone blocks a public roadway, stages a mob scene that results in property damage or injury, or advances toward you in a threatening manner and all of a sudden the constitutional aspect becomes the news cycle of the day instead of who bloodied whose nose.

That’s easy to do at the outset. Just walk up to a law enforcement officer, point at one or more of the protestors and tell the officer you want to file a complaint.

The reason most people don’t do it is because they don’t have the time or money to pursue it past that point, or they don’t want to become an individual target for reprisals and the agitators know that.

They count on the right to be unwilling to engage them at the constitutional level.

This is only going to get worse once the general election campaigning is on in earnest.

Both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are formidable opponents for Mrs. Clinton. The reason Trump is leading is that his supporters feel that unlike the establishment GOP, he will fight for their right to be heard.

It would behoove us to examine history, get a handle on what’s happening, identify how it happens, and oppose it on legal grounds.

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